Opera Turbo Demonstrated at Mobile World Congress: Many Times Faster

[Mobile World Congress] We were among the first to see a demo of Opera Turbo at MWC. To make a long story short, Opera Turbo uses a server-side rendering engine. Basically, the page is rendered on a server then sent to the client (handset or else) in less and smaller elements than it would normally be. Elements are also compressed. The net result is faster page load. In the demo (running on a PC), Opera Turbo was 3.5x faster than a browser not using their technique.

Opera will make money by selling Opera Turbo (as a pre-installed browser) to wireless carriers that can’t keep up with increased bandwidth usage. It is much cheaper to by software than to upgrade the infrastructure, so this is an interesting business proposal.

Users will experience faster page downloads because Opera Turbo generates less HTTP requests. Each request introduces a lot of latency, which is a common problem with mobile networks. All in all, this seems to be a win situation for everyone involved. Now if Opera could have a sexy pinch and zoom…